Engineers' Stories: Running
by IronRaven
Summary: The Invasions of 3050 is in full swing, and we are almost out of the FFR. The running is now. The Fates are always in motion but those who will win must make thier own fate.


Engineers' Stories: Running  
by Ironraven

Battletech was once the copyright of FASA, but now that of FanPro. The images of the "Unseen" are actually other people's, but FASA put them to better use than Harmony Gold ever did. RavenWolf Engineering and the crew is mine.

---

"You look like you could use a drink."

I sat up, blinking at the light of the mess. I'd been staring at my hands for a while, thinking. The speaker was large woman. Not fat, but large- she couldn't have been much shy of two meters in height, and she looked like she could break a man's leg withough trying if she wanted. Her hair was cropped short, her eyes sharp, unflinching. My mind flashed to a childhood memory when those amber eyes blinked. The zoo on Oriente had a North American puma. Those were the eyes this woman had. "I'm sorry?"

She set a tumbler before me, filled with two fingers worth of a soft looking, amber fluid. Two chips of ice floated in it. "It's medicinal." She sat on the bench across from me. The sounds of a dropship coasting out towards a jump point were all around us, mixing with the sounds of machine tools and heavy equipment.

I sipped it carefully, feeling the scotch heat my throat. I still ached all over from the launch. Someone had knocked me down to the decking and told me to get on my back. Then it felt like a battlemech stepped on my chest, the engines roaring through an emergency launch, while the hull rang with the occasional weapons hit. My knees and hands still burned from the contact with the abrasive decking. I'd been on dropships plenty of times, but nothing like this. The launch had been an escape from hell, into... what? "Thank you." I sipped again. "Who are you?"

"I'm Jane, I pilot Tubby, the Charger. You had a camera, not a gun- reporter?" She flexed her hands unconciously, as if on the controls of her mech.

I nodded, giving my name. "Free Worlds League Press Association. They sent me to the Draconis Front to cover... well, you know." Her wry grin told me she knew. Of course she knew. That Charger had been amazing to watch- heavy, but agile, and much better armed than it should have been. It had stood at the top of the boarding ramp, covering us with laser fire as the engines started to roar, before the pilot shouted through the PA to get out of the way, she was going back. It wasn't more than 7 meters from me as it bent it's knees, landing backwards on hips and elbows. I watched men in dark grey, oil and dirt stained suits jump out of the way despite the crushing weight of lift off, a howling wind blowing out of the hold just before the door clanged shut.

I'd gotten mixed in with a bunch of support personnel back at the evacuation point, when the invaders' mech started dropping from orbit. I'd been spending as much time helping to load what looked like the important parts of some factory as I had covering the story. A pair of fighters strafed the marshelling area, destroying the trucks that had held the machines. Trucks burning, people screaming. A salvo of missiles slammed into the crowd, others punching into the labormechs that were helping us load. A hand had grabbed my by the scruff of my neck, pulling me from the ground, pushing me towards the nearest dropship. Mechs were falling back towards the drops, firing over and over, the air hissing and rolling as it burned under the intense heat.

The dropship, it wasn't a military model. It was a cargo job, a Mammoth. The hull was mottled in different shades of metal, obviously patchworked armour. Crew had been dragging missile racks and various things out as more important cargos were going aboard. I didn't know what they were, in the chaos. They all had the same jumpsuits on, with patches that matched the emblem on the hull. A face, split down the middle. On the left side, it was the face of a grey and black furred canine; the right, a deeper black, the face of a bird. A white cog wheel on the forehead, and a bluish-white starburst behind.

I sipped at my drink again. "What ship is this? I saw the emblem, I didn't recognize it. Who are you people? Where are we going?" Blushing, I shut up. Part of my job was using words coheriently.

She grinned as she reached out, turning on the vox recorder that was clipped to my jacket. It made her otherwise plain face light up like a sunrise. "This is the _Calli_. Right now, we are putting as much space between us and where we found you." She laughed, grimly, "I never learned the name of that planet. The Dracs tried to comendeer us, then the Chief and the Major said that it wasn't needed, it was our fight to. We're RavenWolf Engineering. We were in the Republic when these guys hit us. We've been falling back and leaving suprises ever since."

Without noticing, my hands stopped shaking. It wasn't the booze, not entirely. Being back on the job was at least as responsable. "RavenWolf, I've heard that name before, but the stories never made much sense. I know about the Slingshot, but I've never seen one."

She leaned back, putting her boots up on the table, powerful arms crossed. "You'll get to see one, don't worry. We are RavenWolf. We fix it, no matter what it is. Old factories, bridges, water plants, mechs, tanks, fighters, your entire home gaurd. We work for pretty much anyone, and we like stepping on bullies."

I had to laugh. This lady looked like she could go into the lowest dives I could think of, and start cleaning up the place. Bullies probably never bothered her, at least not personally. She reminded me of her 'mech in how she moved- absolutely huge, but with a predator's grace. "Is it always this noisy on the... _Calli_?"

"That's not noise. That is the sound of survival." She stood up, taking the empty glass from my hand. "Come on, I'll show you." She led me back towards the cargo bay. I'd never been in a Mammoth-class cargo ship before. It was huge. 6 mechs were locked into craddles along the walls, others laying on the decking like wounded soldiers. Around them, people with pallet jacks and endoskeletons moved massive machine tools around, packing them for transport. Uniforms were everywhere- Combine, Republic, FedCom, and RavenWolf. A knot of people stood by each mech, checking the damage. I glanced about in confusion, looking for 'Tubby', before I realised that there was more than one hold. Along the walls, technicians were already at work on their tools. Jane handed me a helmet, the muffs going over my ears, the face shield over my eyes. She leaned close, shouting to be heard. "We've got 10 days until we get to where we left _Archimedes_! At least that long after the jump! In 20 days, we should have most of these mechs functional again! Every mech we've got working is another mech back in the fight!"

No two mechs wore the same paint scheme. Insignia from mercinary units mixed with those of three Houses. Closest to us was a Hunchback, the autocannon housing blown almost totally off. Two Pheonix Hawks were stretched out side by side, thier panels open. It looked like they could make two mechs into one, but that would be about it. A battered Marauder was braced against the bulkhead, next to a Valkyrie. Behind me, the harsh blue light of an arc cutter threw nightmare shadows on the ground for a breath's time. "Do you have all these parts?"

"What we don't have, we'll make!" She found the person she was looking for, a tall, slender man whose helmet was marked with three red stripes. "CHIEF! I FOUND THAT REPORTER FELLA!"

He tapped on his hearing protector, shaking his head, before he pointed to a length of stairs bolted to the wall. It was between the legs of a mech I didn't recognize- was this a Slingshot? When Jane dogged the door behind us, it was like stepping into another world. It was cool, almost cold, the air flat smelling, a far cry from the acrid heat of the work bay behind us. Blast sheilds had been lowered outside of thick windows, blocking us from look down on the work and cargo bays. The whir of computer fans filled air as a short, squat man with salt and pepper hair typed rapidly with two fingers, talking to someone over a headset. He was still wearing a mechwarrior's coolant suit, a long knife strapped to his left calf. The screens around us still held tactical maps of where we'd just left. I could recognize some of the unit markings, but not all of them. I brushed my fingers over the screens. This wasn't what I expected from an engineering firm. This looked more like what I would expect in a moderately successful mercenary unit's command center. Other screens showed lists of what looked like inventories. I set my helmet on a peg near the hatch when my hosts did the same.

"Hi, Bob. How bad does it look?"

The man Jane had called Chief flomped in a swivel chair mounted to the decking. "Like hell in space, Zeek. Any word on the fighters?"

"They linked up with a Leopard from some merc lance I've never heard of. They are headed to jump point Epsilon, where ever that is. They'll meet us at some point." He lowered his face, rubbing it in his hands. "_Artimis_ reports her VTOL system is gone, but _Apollo_ is in pretty good shape, all things considered. It sounds like they just had four mechs that made it back to the ralley point get on that bird. Probably none of that lance left. The jumpship pilot has declared himself in charge; no one is stupid enough to argue that. What shape are the mechs in?"

"Tubby is in the general cargo bay, sitting in front of the door. We've got him tied down, but he'll fall through the bulkhead if we do any kind of hard manuvers. Aragorn tried to jump out of mud, we'll have to clean his jets out with a jack hammer. Star Fire lost an arm and took a lot of torso damage, but we have the parts to fix him. Unfortunately. Other than that, our guys look good. One of the guests will probably get Hellbacked, the others... who knows. We don't have enough beds out there. Some of those poor mechs won't make it." He turned to the computer, calling up a file. "_Eratosthenes_?"

"She's with us, no problems there. We lost the LRM carrier and the last of labors, along with most of the Bulldogs. The infantry is a mess. Able reported that they were in close contact with some Toads before I lost contact; they were three clicks out. We also picked up a couple of Zhukovs and some Draconis jump troops. Lot of odds and sods from the labor pool they threw together. They got most of her redtags aboard. The Doc says he's got about three dozen wounded over there, but nothing we can operate on with what we have.

"I took the liberty of having some of our onhand LRM racks rigged for one shots and off loaded. Whoever stayed behind will need them. The engineers report that they mined the ammo dump- the FedCom troops they were with seem a bit scandelized. One of us will have to talk to them about it. Very few officers, but the regular troops are listening to us pretty well." The man turned to look at me. "And that leads us to you. It's not every day we have a reporter aboard. What can you do?"

I suddenly became aware of just how alone I was on this vessel. Everyone else here was military, or something like it. I was a civilian who was just grabbed out of the crowd clamouring to be evacuated, becuase I had a strong back. "I- I don't know? I know how to take film, and write copy, and interview people. I can shoot if I really need to, but I'm not much of a soldier."

"We'll find you something. If nothing else, we can use you as an astech. Not afraid of getting dirty, are you? You know anythign about mechanics? Maybe computer programming or optics?" I shook my head. Dirty? I wasn't in a position to object. The rest? It was all lostech to me. "Being a reporter, you probably have questions. We'll find time to answer some of them. Right now, we have too much to do."

---

Any one alive today knows the story. We were running away from the Clans, fallng back through what was once the Resalague Republic, into the Draconis Combine. RavenWolf had been somewhere towards the edge of the Republic, near the Draconis border when the Bears literally landed on top of them. Somehow, they'd been able to keep thier dropships and mechs alive through this, thier third retreat, but this last one had beaten thier ground troops badly.

But it wasn't thier way to mourn with a spectical. There was no wake, there was no service. The house troops they had with them all said something for the lost. RavenWolf just kept working. But it was the little things that I noticed that showed me how their grief was to released. The regular soldiers, they'd lost comrades and friends. These people had lost family, several of them literally. The signatures and wishes for luck scrawled inside the mechs they worked on were how they showed it. When it came time to ammo the mechs, the loaders took the time to put a name on each missile's warhead, or draw demonic faces, or just scribble an insult.

The house troops still looked and sounded like they were planning on going home, when this was over, when peace returned. But these mercinaries, they didn't. They were home where ever the were. I'd heard the term "citizen of the Sphere", but these people really were. They worked hard, but never to the point they got careless. They knew when they had to stop, when they were loosing thier edge. And after a break, it was back to work.

Some let me interview them, but the stories they told, I couldn't give them to my editor. He wouldn't understand. The photos of people hugging the ankles of a rebuilt Pheonix Hawk, like little kids hugging a parent released from the hospital. I recorded thier shouts of joy when the "Hellback" moved, twined partical cannons gleaming on it's shoulder. It had awed the the FedCom techs into silence, while their Draconis contingent bowed cerimonally. I listened to it afterwards- those who hadn't been there wouldn't understand, but I was starting to. Every day, us guests became more like our hosts. I found myself crying when they took the saws to what was left of a mech that was mangled beyond recoverability, harvesting it's systems like surgeons over a dead patient.

For the house troops, it would be over when thier nations said it would be. For RavenWolf, it wouldn't be over until they were finished killing the invaders. They didn't want to push the Clans out. They wanted to follow them home. And I found myself thinking of myself as the chronicler of thier tales. When we reached the rally planet, I sent my stories onward, even if most people would never understand.

---

I ended my first day with RavenWolf sitting next to Tubby. I'd been around mechs before, but never this close. I'd also never been around those who were part of a family. Maybe that was their luck- man and machine, they didn't want to leave anyone behind if they could help it. Anyone who didn't make it was mourned, regaurdless of if they had a heart or a fusion engine.

I winced as I felt something slip under my fingers. I had found something for me to do other than make carbon dioxide for the potted plants. I looked down at the neurohelmet in my lap, a bucket beside me. Surrounded as I was by weapons and machines, I had at once the easiest and worst job I'd ever had. The last mechwarrior who'd worn this helmet, her canopy melted under a laser blast, which had boiled and exploded her body. I had helped lift her from the Pheonix Hawk, and place her in a body bag. Everyone else had a job they could be doing. I was just in the way. I asked for cleaning supplies. I had once worked in a kitchen, washing dishes, when I was in school. I had scrubbed the cockpit until my fingers were almost raw. All that was left was to clean parts of her from the neurohelmet. It would go to another pilot, another mechwarrior. He probably wouldn't know about the one who came before him, or even care to know. There wasn't time.

Swishing the sponge in the bucket of cleaning water, I remembered something from a long forgotten history class, a quote. Something about the price of peace being paid in blood. In my pocket was a copy of the information from the dead woman's dogids. When I was done, and the padding of the helmet was dry, I was going to fold it and slide it into the lining. That tiny slip of paper was a bill.

---

**Author's notes:**  
I know it is a little disjointed to read. It is supposed to be.


End file.
